Mary Sincell McEwen is a writer, editor, and proofreader. She is a graduate of West Virginia University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in theatre (playwriting). She and her husband John have three grown sons.
To stand on the edge of a river and smell the wet clay and sand, to see the magic silver waters lap repeatedly in the same spot, flicking off the sun in glittering specks and hiding crawdads and minnows in shadowy pockets, curling about those old patient rocks that have lain there for who knows how long…. This is a place of solace. This is a place for stopping and breathing; for listening; for shedding the pace for a precious unfettered time. We aren’t just visiting a foreign place. We are coming back to a place that holds the same chemistry in its bones as is in our own. We seek out nature because we are nature.
Sometimes it’s too much, grinding along in this life, watching the energy wasted in futile battles of mole hills that have been exaggerated into mountains. The vast, skewed life views, the misunderstandings, the bitterness and cruelty born of never having been loved enough, the fear of alienation, and ultimately the dread of death. Sometimes it is indeed too much, and exhausting in its mystery. What is this all about? What is the point of this odyssey? Are we ever to know? Will death bring a bright, warm light to the mysteries of this gravity-ruled existence on this planet, so sadly sick right now? Will we understand at last? Will the clarity come to us in a rush and make us gasp “Of course!” One has to hope.
In the meantime, because it is too much, we find our way to the riverbank for respite. Standing on that carpet of pine needles, cushy and fragrant, we can get the first glimpse of the water flickering between the trees. It’s so exciting to see it there, to know it still runs, it still exists. It’s still carving the path onward, digging in a fraction more along the curved banks every moment. It looks the same but could hardly be more different, as every moment the water is new. Every ribboned curve, every shimmering fall, every bubbling ripple — it’s all continuously new. Even as the familiarity of the sight soothes, one must acknowledge that it is most definitely changing at all times. When a storm comes, the trees might be knocked over or the riverbed may be altered. We humans don’t take kindly to that abrupt, rude interruption. We decry the damages, we ache for the uprooted trees, we shake our fist at the new riverbed. It’s not where it is supposed to be. We hate that. We cry out for the past. When things were better. When things were normal and expected and familiar. Not now, when the landscape has been turned about. We pine for what once was, for the time when the surroundings were right, for the time when we were more content and secure.
But the reality is that nothing is ever the same. Nothing stays. Nothing is unaltered by the very passage of time. The water rushes through every second, always different. Such is life. We are ever out on the bow of a ship, leaning into the unknown, often full of hubris thinking we know what is next. “I’ve done this before…” No, you haven’t. None of us has done anything before that will go precisely the same way again. We have a habit of adding our own decor to memories, making them comfortable and complete when in reality the events of our past all had the bumps and the pain. But we survived tough times to retell them, garnished and bathed. We can create our own history, attaching love and devotion to those moments, to those particular rivulets or rapids, laying out our assertion that things were simply better before. Then we stand in judgment of today, wistful in our longing for what has gone on and what we can no longer have. We simplify our experiences, placing them in the good pile or the bad. When life’s eddies switch to another riverbed path, we rage against it and declare that things “will never be the same again,” a nonsense phrase if you think about it. Things are never the same. Never, ever. We are forever cutting our path forward, and it is never repeated.
We are therefore often beholden to our traditions. We arrange and plan and set up our experiences to either repeat a success or to at long last actually have success. There is incomparable comfort in reliving a tradition if all goes well. Sitting amongst one’s family on Christmas morning, for instance, calm and secure, with no where to go for hours, giddy with anticipation for a gift well-found to be opened by a beloved soul. Wearing our pajamas into the early afternoon, sharing a breakfast of bacon and eggs, lolling about with the sounds of one another’s voices telling stories, laughing, maybe even singing. For my river of life, this is one day of comfort that I do seek to repeat again and again, as best as we can. Those moments, those precious hours, hold the joy of life for me. There are others, of course. Everyone has their pockets of comfort. Sitting about a campfire on a chilly evening surrounded by family or dear friends; a hike into the woods deep and lush; a good game of poker or Bridge or chess with a fine companion; a well-cooked meal consumed in slow measure with those whose faces are dear, whose affections matter. We strive to create these moments to give our world-weary souls some respite. And good for us in making an effort. But we should never expect things to be the same. We will forever be let down if that is our only expectation, always leaving us with the wistful wish for times gone, setting us on a trajectory of frustration and sadness. The river ever runs. The river is never the same.
While that truth may be sobering, we do have the capacity to change our perspective. If change is ever-present, surely that means there is ever hope for improvement, for healing, for alterations that lead to even more comfort and satisfaction. Change very often means progress. Change can translate to enlightenment, understanding, growth. At this particular time in history, there is much fear and anguish over the perception that “history is being rewritten” by those who wish to shine a light on all aspects of times gone by. Pride, adoration for heroes, a sense of self and history are all threatened for some who hold up the past in one way, rigid and resolute. But if we are to grow, if we are to allow ourselves to feel empathy so that we can learn at least in part what past human history means to others, then we must grasp the truth that what transpired in years gone by may not be what we have always believed. What was true for some was certainly not true for others. What was glory for some was brutal cruelty for others. What was success for some was blinding defeat for others. On and on. There is never just one story, just one path, just one swirling portion of the river. There is a myriad of waves, ripples, tributaries, rocks, storms, and droughts, all shaping the river of life every moment in every way. We must try to see the entire waterway with all its bumps and all its rapids, not just what we have always learned is its path. We cannot point to the water and say, “This is how it always was and always will be,” because that is just not true. The more we cling to that with angry stubbornness, the more we will move apart from one another, with fury raging and cruelty given a pass. We cannot survive that.
Let’s seek our solace at the riverbank. Let’s ponder that ever-moving, ever-changing beauty and find in it joy and hope and a new perspective. As fast as that water moves, our lives are faster and far more brief. We have but one arc of time to walk this planet, with an inevitable end. In our short time here, we should try to see the entire river with all its nuances, and to accept that it is always plunging forward into the unknown, just as we are. In that we can find our peace and our comfort, understanding we are all part of a wonderfully mysterious odyssey, best shared through widened eyes and deeper empathy.
The tallest, scraggly peak of the hemlock might very well have scratched the clouds on some days. It sure seemed well high enough for that, especially to me, a child of 5 years, probably not much taller than 3 feet. The tree was so many times my height. I would lie on the ground and look up into those draping branches and I couldn’t see the top. It was a crisscrossed mass of half-inch needles and tiny cones all hanging down lazily from each sappy branch.
My feet pressed against the rung of the ladder. Dad let me put it up against the playhouse that was directly under the hemlock so that I could climb up to the roof and sit there. There was something novel and cheeky about sitting on the roof of the little structure. But at this moment I was sitting on the ladder, my behind uncomfortable against the rung and my little legs stiffening to ease up there and put more weight on my bare toes. It was an old, dry, wooden ladder not used much, and set at such an angle as to be nearly flat. I was lying on it as if it were a hammock, and though a little person, I still had to manage and balance properly on the rungs that were a foot apart.
The back yard was always darker and lonelier than the front yard because our pool was out front. That’s where everyone was drawn like ants to a watermelon rind. Everyone wanted in the water. I did, too, most of the time. But there was solace to be had in the quieter, greener, tree-ier back yard. And I worried that the backyard felt sad to be neglected, always in the shadow of the front yard’s blue and thrilling pool. So I liked to come be in the back, so as to help it feel some appreciation.
The playhouse came to being as a crate used to ship a printing press. My dad was a printer, and he lugged the thing home from work because it was such a good, solid rectangular box that could so easily be transformed into a place for us kids. He thought of things like that. He put a pitched roof on it with shingles. And he made a door and a window. I fit inside nicely. It smelled of hemlock because the tiny needles littered the ground and the floor. We had a broom in the house, in fact, to try to keep up with the constant piles.
My place in my sibling lineup was the very last of five. My sister, who was the next up, was four years older, which put her in a bracket that was most of the time much removed from my own. She was into the Beatles and the Monkees while I was still dressing up Barbie and trying to braid her hair. My brothers were much older, usually relegating me to the sideline jobs of “water girl” or “nurse” in their big kid rough games, or using me as a cute prop when flirting with teenage girls. I was a good draw, I think. But all this meant I was often alone as a kid. I made up my games alone and played them alone. And it was fine. No sadness at all. I was happy to be on my own most of the time, and happier still when I had my cat Sahib with me. We played chase and monsters and scratch-me-if-you-can.
The back yard is full of towering oaks, the dear hemlock, and lilac bushes. The ground is every shade of green with grasses and matted green moss. Squirrels and deer and rabbits coexist with few fears, and black bears saunter through once in a while. But humans are usually scarce. When one of us ventures back, there is the quiet of a private club being breached… and one feels the need to tread lightly.
The playhouse was always a tiny bit scary, with its entrance facing away from our house. Something could be in there. Or someone. But I would take a breath and venture around, at last, casually and calmly so if something were in there, I would not startle it but I would also show it that I was casual and calm and then it wouldn’t take advantage. Making that corner took guts. I had to steel myself and do some persuading in my little brain.
“There is nothing in there. Stop being a baby,” I would think. “Stand up and go on.” And I would, and then it would so suddenly be okay. Safe and occupied by just me. Whatever game I was planning to play would commence, my imagination doing its thing. Easy peasy.
But first my dirty six-inch feet had to be brave. My spine had to straighten and overrule any other play-grimy body part that balked at stepping forward and around that blind corner of the playhouse. It was good training, since we must often be alone when facing blind corners. While others are screaming with glee in the pool around front, there are simply times when we must go on elsewhere alone, on our own bare feet, with our own gameplan and a promise to our own heart that we will be casual, calm, and downright fearless.
What a strange time. I have said that — we have all said that — for months and months now. In the Before Time — pre-Covid — we were already dealing with a lot of unprecedented stuff. The national government situation has certainly been new. The weird taking-sides stress was already present, with most of us not at all sure with whom we could talk casually about our feelings and our beliefs in things. The atmosphere has been all about taking a stance and sticking with it, and then feeling such disappointment when friends’ stances are painfully contrary to our own. We have had to ask ourselves a lot of questions, how we feel about things, what we believe to be true or false, what we value, what we will stand up for and what we will meet with a closed mouth. Opinions and theories and beliefs have been vocalized, and we have been forced to see one another in a new, sometimes unpleasant light. At this point our conversations are careful, at least among us who hope to avoid tension and conflict, or who are aware that our perspective may very well be quite different than that of the person next to us.
That’s where we were in March when we were told that a virus was growing and we had to be aware and careful. Those stances that were defining our world view stayed in place mostly, and even the protection we were directed to take became part of our stance. To wear a mask or not was immediately transformed into yet another political volleyball, unfortunately. Up and over the net it goes, on and on even now. Historians will look back at this time and be so very perplexed. Our behavior in general is not going to make much sense, I don’t think. Psychologists will fathom it better than most, knowing that what is manifesting as line-drawing and stiff-armed resistance was first born as frustration, disappointment, and fear. We are muddled in the now of it, trying to get through. We are swimming in the murkiest pond, searching for sense and direction in watery, opaque silt, running out of air, clawing at whatever we can see. Somehow we have to get to the bank and crawl out. But we’re not there yet.
And now, Thanksgiving. It’s the comfy holiday, I always think, because it’s pretty easy. We just cook. And gather. Eat. Wash dishes. Be together. That’s it. No gift-buying, no programs to perform or strategic plans to lay out for all family members to manage. At least for me, Thanksgiving is a gentle holiday, initiated with the buying of the traditional food and with the queries to our three 20-something sons… what are your plans? When will you be home? If you land in Pittsburgh, he can pick you up on his way home…. If you go through Morgantown, you can meet so and so…. All the travel logistics and strategies, laid out every year like a treasure map, with the big red X right on our house on the day. That day when we wake up all together under one roof, staying in our PJs, switching on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The cooking commences, with John cutting up a colorful pile of red and green bell peppers and onion to saute together for his signature sausage stuffing. The bird is prepared and shoved into the oven, and the fragrances wrap around us. I make pumpkin pies while the boys hang in the living room, catching up, ribbing each other mercilessly, comfy and at home. The easy holiday commences with calm.
While I could say here that I didn’t realize how wonderful it was, I won’t. Because I did realize. I reveled in those sparse days of ours, when we all were together again. After 20-plus years of very close proximity living, sharing one full bathroom and our bedrooms just a few steps apart, we do all gravitate toward that togetherness, even if we pick at each other and fight old fights. We all spent so much time in a symbiotic situation that we fall back into it with ease and comfort. Would we want to be together all the time again? No. Of course not. The boys are men now. They have their own places to be and to grow. They go their ways tethered in love to us, but only in thought now, in affection. I often imagine the golden bands that connect the five of us, floating out across the country, buffeted by so many breezes and storms, but always holding. Always. So the time when those golden bands do shrink and pull us all into the same house again, maybe twice a year now… I revel in it. I stop and breathe it. I go to another room and just listen to the voices, the exchanges, the camaraderie of brothers. I see on their faces brief expressions that they’ve made since babyhood. I recall moments from way back, holding them against me, their tiny fingers clutching my shirt or a tendril of hair. I remember the warmth of their little heads under my chin, where they would lie so still and full of peace. I remember when they were 8 and 9, and getting awkward into their teens. We barreled on through such busy days, with soccer and band and homework and our travels. High school was a rapid vortex, starting with a speed-up in 9th grade and then flying on and on to graduation so fast. Then off to college, living on their own, making decisions, weathering rough patches. And now, each paired with a lovely young woman, sharing time and life together, being adults, launched from a home of imperfection but of love. One a teacher, another a scientist, and another a writer. Each with so many more layers, of course, but overall, just good men. Kind men. Funny and gentle, all. Drawn home right now, but forced to resist it.
This damn virus. All is derailed. There’s fear and worry, and such tedium. We are living through a time we will all remember, and every single human on the planet is in some way affected. We have been stopped in our tracks like a train lurching to a rough stop. As the Christmas holidays approach, I have annually said something about how we need to simplify. And then we don’t. The stress of the traditions and expectations and the longing to provide a great surprise or a great concert or the gift that lands better than any…. so much striving. And there are concerts and shows and charity drives. The Christmas specials and movies, too, and so many interpretations of a Christmas Carol. Dickens would be shocked. We want to reach out, go to parties, eat so much food, and have cookie bakes. It’s a whirlwind, start to finish, and every year so many of us find ourselves in the heart of it when we were really going to try not to get that far in this time.
But this year, it’s a new world. And somehow we have to comprehend and accept that, and do the right things to keep everyone well. Isn’t it funny how we humans put so much importance on specific days? This Thursday is just another 24-hour revolution of our planet. It will be similar to the one before and the one after. But we humans… we say it is more. We say that day is chosen. It is special and calls for family to be together, to share food and tradition, to make a huge effort to be part of the ceremony and rite of it all. But it’s just a day. So is Christmas day. Humans chose the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus. It, too, is just another trip around on the axis. The significance of the third Thursday in November and of Dec. 25 is a man-made choice. So perhaps we can look at them with some resignation that this year, they will not be all that. This year, we will choose other days, post-vaccine, to come together in love and in gratitude. Imagine when we all feel safe again! Imagine when we can stand in an airport ready to greet someone again, when we can blend our voices in song again, when we can hang out together, share drinks and food, and laugh right there, our mouths open, our hands touching others’ arms, hugging, or having an intimate talk nose to nose again. I don’t think we will do any of it for a long time without remembering what it was like to be unable to do any of it. When we can be armed with a vaccine and creep back out into the world, how rich it will feel to be free and safe. When the danger has passed, I say we claim another day of the year to celebrate. Who cares when it is? Let’s make our own Thanksgiving and Christmas wrapped into one. Let’s bake and cook and play games. Let’s get each other all caught up on how we weathered this weird, dark storm. Let’s remember our year of difficulty and use it as inspiration, ever after.
This is perhaps the last time the boys were all together in the house. Last Christmas. Playing a game, along with old friends Seth and Tristan. I am waiting for the day when they will be around that table again.
The cicada buzz is waning. Have you noticed? It was so loud this summer. Or it seemed so. That out-of-the-blue buzz that grows in intensity until it is really right in your head for a bit, and then tapers off to nothing. And then it starts again. In mid-July to late August, they buzz up a storm, with their zzzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzs overlapping one another until it’s just a cacophony of bug noise. They are strange, ancient things, those bugs. When I was a kid we called them locusts. But that was incorrect. Locusts are like grasshoppers while cicadas are actually related to crickets. And locusts don’t make the same noise. They rub their wings together to make a repetitive, rhythmic grind, sort of “ooohee, ooohee, ooohee.” But cicadas have a special organ in their bodies called a “tymbal” that creates their signature buzz. The organ looks like a seashell under the wings, and it contains a series of ribs that buckle one after the other when the cicada flexes its muscles. The rib buckle produces a click, and the clicks in rapid succession create the buzz. Think bendy straw. You can bend it back and forth and it makes snapping sounds. If you could push, pull, and twist a bendy straw hundreds of times a second, the sound of the clicks would be so close together that your ears would just hear a buzz. That’s how fast that speedy cicada can vibrate its tymbal. (Thanks to Kyle Schiber of the Chicago Nature Museum for this info.)
The bugs have gone through their regular cycle of egg, nymph, and adult. The ones we hear annually usually live three to five years. I was surprised by that. I always think bugs have short lives, like a few weeks. But these things are around for a long time. Some species, of course, live 17 years, waiting to emerge from the ground all at once in one of those cicada summers when they are everywhere. In listening to them this summer, I often mused that they don’t know what we humans are grappling with these days. They don’t know we’re frustrated, worried, weary, angry, discombobulated, and sad. They don’t know we have missed our reunions and vacations, and that we know people who have been sick. The stout buzzing creatures with buggy eyes are attached to the trees, laying eggs and making noise as always, unaware that their human cohabitants are having trouble. And like them, the trees have kept doing their thing, and are now starting into their fall wardrobe of reds and oranges. All things growing are moving away from the summer tenderness of brilliant color and soft petals on to the fall weariness, pushing seeds out now to keep the line alive as this year’s greens fade to browns. All is happening as usual, even as our lives are in a chronic state of unrest.
For the past many months, as this summer so stealthily has grown up and is now ready to leave, I have felt as if I am in a flooding river, barely able to get my feet down to the bottom that is rushing by at such a speed. My feet slam against the rocks that fly by, and I am just able to keep my nose out to breathe. The year is fleeing. There have been many times when I have had to concentrate not only on what day it is, but what time of year it is. All my anchors and hallmarks of regular life have been dispensed, canceled, and erased. I am hurtling down a river I don’t recognize. I don’t know where the rapids are, and I fear the falls. When will I see my boys again? Will they stay healthy? When will I sing with my friends again? How safe is my mother, and what kind of life is this for her as she nears 92? How are all my friends faring whom I never see or hear from or reach out to, even as I think of them and miss them? They are hurtling down the river, too, I know. We all are. We are exhausted and soaked and afraid. And no one knows when we will be able crawl onto the bank again.
But the cicadas are moving along. The monarchs are emerging. The geese are taking to the air in their V-shape more often, and the oak trees are letting loose ripe and ready acorns. The sun slips down the evening sky, issuing that odd golden light, and then just before it sinks away, bathing all in a magic and dark pink. As that last crescent is blotted out, the air shifts, markedly, to cool and then cold. Furnaces kick on now, and windows open all summer are pulled closed with chilly fingers. Despite all that has transpired, all that has been lost, all that has been missed, the year is definitely aging as always, winding on toward autumn and winter. There are times when I think it can’t be so. How is time rolling on so heartlessly? Can’t it stop and wait for us to catch up? To get our footing and find our way?
But it cannot. Of course. We have to keep riding along, taking things as they come, trying to find ways to love from afar, to accomplish things we didn’t expect to try at all, and to learn new paths to fun, to joy, to solace. In yoga practice, one tries to settle the mind and be “present.” We strive to live in that very moment, that very second, and to consider the gift of our place here, between the Earth and heaven. It’s not easy, being present. Thoughts elbow in, taking up brain space and causing one to consider such things as what to make for dinner or why people can’t be kinder to one another. But we acknowledge the thoughts and let them go, like helium balloons, and return to the present. It takes practice and effort. But the effect is a little rest. A little calm. A relief. So it’s worth it.
If the virus were the only trauma in our lives now, that would be enough. But as we go floundering, crashing down the river of human existence in a pandemic, we are beset with so much more. The hatred in the world is burning like the fires of the West and drenching like the hurricanes of the South. Fear is everywhere, and fear is powerful. It inspires paranoia, anger, stubbornness, and depression. We are afraid of getting sick, of loved ones getting sick, of being misunderstood, of failing, of feeling guilty. We see friends with such different perceptions and understanding, and feel let down by our differences. Somehow we have to go ahead and feel afraid and tired without the anger. Somehow we have to let down our shields of indignation and just allow the swords and arrows of all the terrible things go right into us. Feel them. Hurt because of them. Cry over them. Because then we can better understand. Our perception will be enhanced, and we will be able to see and perceive more for having released the fury and withstood the pain. It’s the oldest legend ever written, letting anger die and love win. Seems so easy.
The world is spinning on, and we have no choice but to ride. There are no reins to pull back or pause buttons to click. The cicada’s song is waning, and preparations are underway for its next phase. Perhaps there is comfort to be found in these things that continue on despite human distress. Perhaps there is peace in the normalcy of changing leaves and lowering temperatures and geese on the wing. We should try to be good. Try to be kind. Try to wait out this hardship and look forward to the day when we are through. When we hear the cicadas again, I hope we will be among one another, sharing space and laughs and music and touch.
When we hear the cicadas again.
This post seemed to be missing something. I decided it needed a pic. So I drew one. 🙂
A few weeks ago, my son Michael called me. He was working in Mountain Lake Park that day in his summertime construction job, and was hot and tired. He said he was going over to my Mom’s to jump in her pool and did I want to come along? Of course I did. Who turns down an invite like that in July? So I dropped whatever it was I was doing and headed out to my childhood home. Michael was there already, fairly covered in dirt and sweat, having a talk with Mom through his mask. He was careful about Mom the whole time he was home. And he was only home because of the pandemic. A grad student at the University of Kentucky, he was teaching some writing classes. They were thrown online-only in March and his office was closed. There was no real point to staying in Kentucky when he could teach online, so he headed home for spring break with the understanding that he would not be back there for at least a few weeks. Of course those few weeks turned into months, and I have been grateful to have him here as we navigate this weird and unprecedented time in our history.
We met on the porch where Mom spends most of her days reading and dozing and visiting with people who come by. After a long yak with her, Michael and I ambled out to the pool. My dad built that pool when I was 2. Throughout my childhood it was the focal point of every summer. I would oftentimes get out of bed and just pull on my bathing suit, knowing I was going to spend the day bobbing around in the water, walking off the wall into it over and over, sitting on its floor and pretending to have a tea party, swimming laps and having races to see who was fastest, and then lying around on the concrete, letting the sun dry every drop on my tanning skin.
Just as Michael and I were finally to get in, we saw the telltale ripples on the surface. Rain. We had lingered so long in our talking that the clouds had been given the chance to really pile up and start throwing it down. We tossed our towels into the bathhouse and got in anyway. The rain fell harder. We giggled and remembered what it was like to swim in the rain. When I was a kid, getting to do that was a treat. If we actually had rain without lightning — that deadly, terrifying, “get out of the pool or you will be electrocuted” lightning — then we would rush to get our swim suits and beg Mom or Dad to let us go in the rain. Inevitably Dad would peer up over his book or newspaper and say, ever so dryly, “But you might get wet….” Hilarious, Dad, come on, can we go? Sure, he would say. Or maybe more often, “Ask your mother.” If we were given the green light, off we would fly, giddy with glee.
Michael and I sunk down so just our heads were out, and we squinted as the rain flicked pool water into our eyes. Each drop, falling from such a height, pierced the surface with a pop, making a fleeting bubble each time. The number of drops picked up, harder and harder, making us laugh just because it was so loud, pounding on our wet heads with a “pap, pap, pap, pap” and chopping the pool water into white splashes. As the rain cooled things a little, we experienced the next phenomenon of rain-swimming, which is the difference in temperature between the air and the water. Suddenly it was warmer in the water than out, and we hunkered down farther to be wrapped in those 80 degrees as the air dropped into the 70s. We stood up and let ourselves get chilled, and then dunked down again, enveloped in what seemed warmer with each dunk. As the rain kept coming, we went under to listen. We held our breath and immersed our ears into the popping drops as they struck the surface. It was like being in a vat of ginger ale. So many memories of doing this very thing flooded my brain. Images of friends laughing and squealing, like Tish Crowe and Nancy Sluss and Pam Bittinger and of course my sister Kathryn. Swimming in the rain is one of those experiences of life that seems to bring us directly into nature, allowing us to take part in something so simple yet so satisfying and different. Different is really good. We need different, especially these days.
Even though the sky was full of stacked, gray clouds, the rain began to slow, and we were hearing rumbling in the distance. We didn’t say anything at first. Sometimes if you ignore thunder, it goes away. But the rumbling got decidedly louder.
“Was that thunder?” I asked casually.
“Yeah,” Michael replied. “But it’s far away.”
The mother light came on in my brain and reminded me, with no reservation, about unsuspecting people being struck by lightning from miles and miles away. As my mind loves to do, it rapidly conjured up the narrative of how we would both be cooked like chickens in a pot, and there would be so much wailing. I mean, really. There would. But I ignored the rumbling, too, because I wanted to stay in. I wanted to keep giggling with Michael and recalling times with his brothers in that pool over the years, telling stories that we both know but love to hear again anyway. We even talked about what it would be like if we did get hit with lightning in there, if people would know it right away, would it be loud, would it hurt. These are things one casually discusses while swimming in the rain. It’s natural.
When the thunder became more insistent, we did decide we should get out. I climbed up the ladder and was reintroduced to gravity, as one is when exiting the lovely buoyancy of water. The light was subdued and a little sad as the clouds shifted about, with the wispy layers almost close enough to touch, and the heavy, tall thunderheads pushing into one another, sluggish and bossy. Lightning zipped down, not as brilliantly as in the night, but somehow more insidious in its challenge to the daylight. The time for swimming was definitely past. One doesn’t taunt lightning.
Michael and I wrapped up in our towels and walked barefoot to the screened porch. Mom said what I thought she would, that it was good that we had gotten out because there was lightning. Yes, we said. We saw it. So we got out.
We stood with our arms folded, each holding our towel tight against our damp skin. The rainy air wasn’t taking any more moisture back, so the towels hung heavy and cold. We knew it was time to peel ourselves out of all things damp and get back into our clothes, but we lingered a bit longer anyway. It’s hard to move on from a time like that, to say goodbye to another moment and move it to the shelf for remembering, not doing. But that’s what life is, right? Moments. Times. And remembering.
Now that Michael has loaded up his car and gone back to Lexington, leaving us and home again, and like his brothers facing that invisible and deadly virus on his own, I have our swim in the rain for remembering. It’s on the shelf along with so many others, for which I am grateful. I’m glad he called me, and I’m glad I went. I will keep seeking these moments for doing and for remembering because there’s always more room on the shelf. I will never stop wishing for yet another time, for another swim in the rain, with those precious ones who hold my heart.
Today I stood on my porch and looked westward. The sky was a gray watercolor, with such a summer feel. The gray grew dark on the edge of the horizon, and I remembered. I remembered what it is like to watch a storm advance. I remembered what my skin feels like when the air is warm against it, and what my sense of smell tells me about that scent of wet earth off in the distance, ushering in the rolling, roiling clouds that my dad would often point out and say, “Look at that thunderhead. Just look at the size of it.” I remembered the pleasant expectation of a coming rain, knowing the ground is calling out for it, knowing I will soon see a show. A bolt of lightning surprised me a little, far off, and I immediately started counting, slowly, “1…2…3….4…5…” and then the thunder growled. A mile or so away. That was our game when I was little. When the lightning flashed, we counted, slowly… that would tell us how far away it was, since sound travels at 1,125 feet per second. There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so if you get to five seconds, you know that thunderhead and its storm are a bit more than a mile away. When I was small and scared of the disruption and wildness of a storm, my brother Don would say, “Let’s sit on the porch and watch!” And we would, with me afraid but fascinated that we were watching it like it was a performance. And we would count. And after the most stomach-vibrating rumbles and brightest flashes, the count would get longer and longer, and the drips would get lazier, and the sky would brighten. And we’d be through. Today I remembered all of that, standing on my porch, gazing at the heavens.
Today I also dug out some record albums I had not listened to in years. I usually just click on Pandora and choose one of the many libraries I have collected, or I listen to my iTunes. But for us youngest Baby Boomers, the record player remains our first audio love. And today I wanted to play records. I gathered up Billy Joel and Toto and America and Electric Light Orchestra. I chose “Glass Houses” by Billy Joel to play first. When it came out, I was a junior in high school and I had claimed Billy as my absolute favorite. I remember the album was not getting the best of reviews, but I clung to it fiercely and was determined to like it. And actually, I did. It’s a pretty cool album. It just isn’t a lot like his previous ones, which I guess was the main complaint. But I was loyal to Billy, and I learned every word. I still know a lot of them, too, as I discovered today. When the needle touched down on that first groove and there were a few of those random buzzes and pops, I remembered. I remembered how I would sit on my bedroom floor by my own turntable, reading the cover notes and lyrics while listening to an album over and over again. Then stacking several on top of each other so they would drop down one after the other, giving me a good hour of continuous music. Then I’d flip the whole stack over to hear the B sides. The music experience was so different then. We all listened to a lot of the same stuff, usually on the radio, and then in our rooms on our turntables. Before Walkmans and way before CDs and a lifetime before iPods, we bought up those plates of vinyl and cherished our collections. I wanted to remember that today, to listen to those Billy songs like “All for Leyna” and “Don’t Ask Me Why” and the pretty “C’etait toi (You Were the One).” To remember those tunes, and the order they are in, and the little fuzzes and static of the album all gave me comfort today.
I realized then that I was seeking and finding comfort in things that once were familiar and that were from a time when the days seem much less complicated and weighty. I suppose that is what nostalgia is. Our brains travel to those places that seem somehow warm and settling, familiar and safe. These last three months have been anything but. This has been the strangest time I have ever experienced, even compared to Sept. 11. I know most people feel similarly. When the virus first took hold and our lives changed, I floundered. I tried to figure out how to best protect my family. I read and watched too much TV. I woke at 3 in the morning and felt panic about my sons, two of whom are still far from us. I fell into a few abysses of terror, imagining that Rob or Alex might get sick, off in Wheeling and Milwaukee, and that I would not be able to go to them. That still makes me queasy, but I have become less afraid and more complacent as this strange saga drags on. And I have become more sad, I’m afraid. I miss the boys. I don’t know when I will see them again, and that is strange and distressing. I’m so very grateful that Michael is here in town. Just seeing his lanky frame bounding up the porch steps gives me such comfort. My boy is here. He is safe and sound. And I talk to the other two very regularly, and they are healthy and cheery. That helps.
But we are untethered. Our once driving, looming deadlines are fading or gone. Our trips and camps and events are disappearing like in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon when the artist’s hand enters, erasing Daffy Duck’s surroundings, much to his spitting protest. The future is an opaque screen, with nothing definite or decided or known at all. One would think that an artist would dream of a time like this. “Oh, you can write or paint or sculpt! You can read masterpieces! You can use this time to improve your life!” But…. for many of us, things have not gone so well in the creating department. My inspiration is flat-lined much of the time. I spend an inordinate number of hours being still, thinking, searching, and sometimes just dreading. I have talked to other artists and I am not alone. Creativity seems to be lying low along with us. Not everyone is stymied by artistic blocks, of course. But I know many who are in a deep funk, and the best we can do is get through the days with as much progress as we can make, which sometimes is just getting a shower, tending to our jobs virtually for a bit, doing a little laundry, and having a game of chase with our cat or dog. We must try to be kind to ourselves in the end, because life is off-kilter right now, and we are processing an ongoing trauma. This is the first blog post I’ve written in three months. Every now and then I am inspired, and I think, “Ohh, I should write about that!” But then the idea of actually sitting down to try to find the words to describe this uncomfortable state of perpetual anticipation — this deep, in-limbo weariness — is always too hard. Today marks the first time I have been able to do it, and I am grasping with everything inside me to corral the words and force them into sentences. And I’ll tell you what, they are wily.
The virus was enough. More than enough. But then there was Mr. Floyd. And in eight and a half minutes, the anguish of a nation, quickly to become the anguish of humankind, filled our chests with an ache we could not push away. A happenstance video showed the people of this planet a brutal, savage, heartless taking of a man’s life. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all imagined it and sat with it and been sickened by it. And the world, so tired and worn with fear and grief, lurched downward yet again in such despair. The simmering stress of the virus, of the battle over how to manage it, what to believe, how to behave, how to implore others to behave, how to mourn its dead — all of that — fused with our anguish over a man calling to his mother before the life was pressed out of him. The sea changed. Fury and rage burst forth. Exasperation and incredulous, angry grief filled so many of us. So many. Living a life is hard enough. How is it that some must be forced to endure even more, simply because their souls are wrapped up in a dark skin? It cannot be the way humans continue anymore. Not anymore. This conflagration of pain and fear and anguish and despair must lead to an upheaval and complete change in the way we live our lives out on this planet. We cannot, cannot, cannot allow this baseless, unjust, blind bigotry to be part of us anymore. We must awake to it and move, make noise, use our wisdom and our empathy, and make something meaningful rise from the snuffing out of Mr. Floyd’s life, and all the others who have been so fatally violated. We must be finished with it.
We are in a time of transition. In childbirth, that is the worst of times and the best of times. When a woman moves into transition, her body shifts into overdrive. All the muscles needed to bring the baby out to daylight must move and alter and stretch. This is not a gradual thing. Transition is shockingly strong and wrenching. One’s body is awash in pain, head to toe it seems. Those attending can see it happening, and they rush to the mother’s side to help her try to focus. It’s so hard to focus. It’s a wall of pain, and she is unable to move away from it. She is trapped by it, and can be lost without a kind voice telling her to breathe, to focus, to hang on. Then it ebbs. And she finds that she is much closer to her most precious goal, having allowed her body to do its thing. When transition is past, significant progress is made.
So here we are. In transition, trying to focus. In the storm, counting down the seconds between the lightning and thunder. Past days seem surprisingly easier, and sometimes I go there for a break. There is calm to be found in singing Billy’s lyrics with the turntable adding an occasional needle pop, or just standing out in the air listening to the robins chirping their twilight “tuk tuk” as the sun drops away. I hope I can help through this transition, offering support and encouraging others to focus and to breathe. We’ll keep counting, and the time between the bolt and the thunder will lengthen. The rain will ease, and the bent grasses will flick back upright. The air will be clean, with brand new ozone scented with the fragrance of soaked dirt. It always has done so. I have to believe it will again.
When I was six, I began lobbying my parents for a pet. I was determined. Anything with fur, I would take. I had a stuffed dog that I carried around with me at all times. I got an old bowl down from the kitchen shelves and pretended to feed it. I do think that might’ve swayed my dad a little. I can’t remember exactly what he said to Mom, but after observing me tilting the stuffed animal and balancing it on its nose in the bowl, he said something equivalent to “She seems to be serious about this pet thing.”
I remember distinctly the day of my 7th birthday. The station wagon (green… always green) came up the gravel drive and Dad got out. He was wearing a tan trench coat. As he came through the kitchen door, I could see he was holding something under that coat. Rather unceremoniously, he handed the object to me. A spindly, legs-straight-out, panicked Siamese kitten. I was amazed. Utterly. Dad got me a cat! Mom didn’t want any cats — she had said so. But Dad got it, and I learned later that Mom was on board, too. They had decided that I was ready. And truth be told, Dad loved animals. He was nearly as tickled as I about this skinny gray-point mewer. The kitten was a wiggly thing, and he scrambled away from me and fled under furniture. Within a half hour of having him in the house, we were forced to upturn the couch and dig him out of the upholstery underneath. It was an auspicious beginning.
That kitten was named Sahib. My brother Jeff thought of that one, and it was an apropos moniker. “Sahib” is the polite way to address an Indian male. Sahib wasn’t so much Indian, but he was male, and we wanted to start out politely, so it worked. I did have to ask Jeff a number of times what it was. “What did we name him again?” “Sah-heeb,” Jeff would answer. I think it took me a good week to remember. But then it was in stone, forever. Sahib. Heebie. The Heebs. It was perfect. A bit later my brother Ben gave him the middle name of “Hobbim.” Sahib Hobbim. My boy. And thus began my lifelong connection to cats. I will never be without one, I do hope. If I end up being institutionalized as an elder, I insist to be in a place where I can have a cat. That has to be an absolute.
Sahib was the first. Then came Fuzz, a random stray who had some pronounced abandonment issues. His entire name, also dubbed by my brother Ben, was Fuzz Link Crinkle Stink Pink Dink Scabious. Then Ben had his tiny tiger-striped Rebel, and my sister had the long-hair Chelsea, and my brother Don gave his wife a tortoise shell named Nutmeg. Our family members have all had cats, with some great names. Bean, Dexter, Gravy, Hammish, Kaiya, and Clive, to name a few. BB (for Brown Balls — sorry), Thor, Coober, Julia, Strider, Molly, and more. My aunt Susan Williams always had cats, too, and her home in Romney was a cat mecca for me. She lived in an antebellum brick home on a farm, and there were just piles of cats to play with. Pinkelpurr and Pinkus lived out their nine lives there, plus a good many more. All the kitties. Fur and purrs and pounces and head-bumps. Sahib lived to be 14. Then I adopted Zoe, another Siamese given to me by a boyfriend at the time. She was a Christmas present, and her arrival was followed on New Year’s Day by me being dumped, so…. sort of a parting gift, I think. She was a great cat. Lived for 20 years, on through my marriage to not-the-same-boyfriend and three sons’ arrivals. She had a stroke and was put down, as I held her, in 2004, much to my absolute heartbreak. My youngest son, not quite 9 years at the time, asked if maybe my dad, who died in 2003, would find her in heaven and show her around. I said I sure hoped so because Dad did love animals so much.
Right now John and I manage three cats. Rex, a lovely buff boy, who found me about five years ago by screaming his 8-week-old head off in the middle of Second Street one night as I driving by. I thought he belonged to the Naylors on the corner who always have cats, so I scooped him up and trotted to their door, expecting to hand him over. “Ummm….,” said Adele. “That one is not ours.” Thus he became one of ours. He’s a beefy, affectionate boy, likely to be found on my legs in the evenings, restricting my movement so John has bring me things. Convenient. Pig is our tiny girl, a petite dark-striped tabby with such a wee face. She actually belongs to Alex, our second son, who found her as a stray at Funland in McHenry, where he worked as a teen. She was following him around and in need, so of course he brought her home. He and his brothers thought it was hilarious to name her after another animal, especially when envisioning being called at the vet. “Pig? Is there a Pig?” Funny how a name seems ridiculous at first, but then becomes quite normal. I do often add a little, in the tradition of most pet owners. To me she is Piggy or Piggy Pie or Piggy Pie Pan. She has lived at various locations, with Alex at college, with us, and back with him. Now he lives in Milwaukee, where he couldn’t have cats at first, so she became quite ensconced here as our grandcat. And I guess here she will stay. We thought she might move out there some months ago when the cat restriction was lifted, but honestly, none of us could make the break. So now Alex and his girlfriend have adopted Turnip, a stripey long-hair girl. We didn’t tell Pig.
That brings me to Miles. Ah, dear, sweet Miles. Miles was the inspiration for this piece, in fact. We got him some 13 years ago, not long after Zoe died. I was missing a Siamese. We did have a tuxedo cat at the time, named Strider. Of all the cats I’ve known and loved, he was the most difficult. Not terribly affectionate, Strider would take a piece of me or anyone else in the family at the least provocation. Although sleek and beautiful, he apparently had self-esteem issues. Or he just loathed humans in general. He had his moments, and I did love him, but… I wanted a purring, attentive pile of fluff to complement our growly, clawing one. So the word went out to all my animal rescue friends — those good souls who make it a mission to find animals in need and get them to people who want them. Caroline Robison is absolutely tireless in that pursuit, and in just a few weeks she found a litter of barn cats being fostered by a good person in Pleasant Valley, and a few of them were definitely part Siamese. They were to be available around my March birthday, so we decided that would be the ticket.
We went to get one kitten but came home with two. One short-hair black and white tabby whom we named Julia, in honor of the Beatles song. The other was the furry, gray-point mix, with ragdoll characteristics. We knew of a darling little boy named Miles at the time, and I thought that was a great moniker for this little furball, too. While Julia was brave and forward, Miles was terrified. Absolutely terrified. He was afraid of us, afraid of his carrier, afraid of the world. Poor little thing. So we cuddled him and cooed, fed him and petted him, and talked softly around him. In some time, he eased into his new life, and he and Julia were soon running around the whole house, tearing up over furniture and back down, playing with anything that moved. Miles became quite affectionate with us, even though he still seemed like he might bolt at any second. John has said to him his whole life, gently, usually while petting him, “Are ya scared, Miles? Are ya scared?” The answer was probably a definite yes most of the time, although he seems to love us even if he’s always ready to flee.
Miles has always reminded me of those furry toys we’d get at fairs when I was a kid. They were called “Squirmles” and were little worm-shaped furry things that when petted would wrap around your finger. Miles seems nearly boneless at times, and he will writhe under and around my hand just like a Squirmle. He also has an uncanny ability to stay just a quarter-inch away from a hand seeking to pet him. He can just avoid contact, just. But he stays nearby, purring and bobbing, tantalizingly soft and furry but one-quarter inch out of reach. As is the way with most cats, he has his own distinct personality, and I have adored him since I first saw him as a tiny white and gray wad of angst and trepidation in the corner of a wooden crate. I think I am probably his person in this life, even though he does trust John and the boys. But I am the apple — or maybe tuna — of his crossed blue eyes, and he finds me always, and generally starts up a conversation or finds his way in between my arms while I type, or he bumps my head with his head and licks my cheek or gently bites my hair. Sometimes he just passes the time near me, eyes half-closed, purr on high, his limbs stretched out and limp.
He has been a source of comfort to me all along. The boys are aware of that, too. In 2008, I was skiing with Alex and Michael, and my bindings were on too tight. I fell on Ace’s Run and felt instant pain in my knee. I was a little panicked and decided that I needed to just get back up and ski on down, especially since the boys had already passed me and were waiting at the bottom. I hate remembering this, but when I started down again, I watched my right knee go completely out of joint, and I was down. In a big way. It was excruciating. Horrible. Alex came running up the mountain in his ski boots. He knew I was hurt. “You look like you’re going to throw up, Mom,” he said. I thought I was going to. I didn’t, but it was the beginning of a long journey of pain and recovery. I bring it up because as I was sitting in the Ski Patrol room, I could not stop thinking of the moment of the dislocation. That instant of gruesome disfigurement was seared in my brain and I could not remove it. It was making me sick. Alex said, “Mom, think of Miles. Just think of Miles.” And so I did. Soft, purry, funny Miles. I couldn’t believe how much that helped. And when I would start to blanche again and moan, Alex would say, “Miles, Mom! Miles!” I was truly astounded by two things: How insightful and helpful my dear 14-year-old son was, and how much it really did help to switch my brain from the trauma to the cat. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Miles.
He is nearly 13 now. His sister Julia died when she was just 2 or 3. Apparently another female of the same litter died at 2 as well, both with apparent heart defects. So I have been wondering ever since we found Julia out in the yard, still and cold, if Miles was soon to follow. But he has held on quite well, at least until the past year or so, when his thyroid apparently went screwy. He has lost weight and is more skittish than usual. He seems to be starving a lot, and his fur has gone from fluffy and clean to matted and unkempt. He is still quite loving and dear, and he plays still, and he and Rex give each other face licks. I think he is content, as far as I can know, but he is definitely failing. I have several options for his care, none of which is really great. I am currently getting two to three pills into him per day. That’s a feat in itself, and some days end in frustration and no pills at all making it to his gullet. He cheerfully gobbled them up for about a year with the help of Greenies, little pill pockets made of some other animals that taste good, I guess. But lately he has turned away from the Greenies, much to my dismay. I have taken to crushing the pills into his food, but I have to watch out because Rex and Pig are all to ready to eat what he leaves behind, and they don’t need the meds in their systems. I have tried shoving the pill down his throat, but that is always a terrible struggle that ends with Mr. Angst rushing off to the attic or basement, scared and shocked at such treatment. If he had pearls, he’d clutch them hard. I can’t bear it. There is one treatment that would cost nearly $2,000. He would be exposed to radiation, which would kill his thyroid, and then he would be sequestered from everyone for several days as the radiation fades. Good grief. I can’t put him through that.
So here we are, facing the inevitable. We always know it’s coming, of course, we people who long for dogs or cats or rats or fish or iguanas or whatever other living being we want as companions. We are aware that we will most likely outlive our pets. It’s just how it works. Sometimes I’m surprised that we get them anyway, facing that terrible fact. But we do it because they are so dear, and we do love to share space and time with another being. They are alive in the same perplexing way that we are alive, sparked by a mysterious jolt of electricity that animates us, gives us breath, and launches our gray matter into seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, and decades of thinking and feeling and reacting. Our bodies are different from our furry friends, yet so similar. We can’t communicate with words, but we express ourselves to one another as best as we can, exchanging sounds and affections, or just by studying one another’s faces for such long moments, and by giving in to sleep while nestled together in a cozy spot. How lucky we are to share the same time on this planet as our sweet creatures. They give us a perfect model for spending our time just by being our shorter-lived companions. Being alive is hard. And because of that, we constantly seek comfort. Some of the best comfort comes in fur and on four legs.
Even so, they can’t stay. Nothing in life can really stay. We can opt to never love anything and live a dry and flat-lined existence, or we can risk it, knowing what loss we will face in time. This is true of any relationship. When we love, we are taking a risk inherently. The joy and comfort of that love is the price. It’s the fee, the rent, the bill. When we gather up that mewing kitten or wriggling puppy, we are initiating our tab. When we fall in love, the meter starts running. Even so, we do it. The price, for many of us, is worth it. Of course some folks are not at all interested in pet ownership, I know. Some just don’t feel that cosmic connection. It’s a messy, expensive prospect to have a pet, and there are allergies and time issues and troublesome behavior. I understand. And some have indeed been so pained by a loss that they don’t wish to take the risk again. But to those of you who do love over and over, I am with you.
Dear Miles is waning. I know. In the time that we have, we will continue to play our games, like wiggling-hand-under-the-blanket or the impromptu wild-chase-through-the-downstairs. We’ll keep finding each other for a purring bump to the face or to split a bite of something good to eat. We’ll share the time of this strange journey together for a bit longer, and I will remember to be grateful for these days. Dearest Miles, my furry boy.
Now, in the comments, please do tell me about your sweet pets, any and all. Ready, go!
This was the day of Julia and Miles’ arrival. Alex and Rob and pictured with the little furballs.Rex and Miles having a rest. As usual. Alex and Pig.
The dissolution of a nearly 130-year-old family business is more complicated than one might think. In fact, being a member of a family that is deeply ensconced in a business is its own complicated and multi-layered situation, and something that only those in similar circumstances can understand fully. I am brought to this place in light of the selling of The Republican newspaper, which transpired just a little over two years ago. I have only arrived at certain realizations because those two years have passed, and I needed time to digest the sale and its repercussions. I understand now that I am just beginning to work through it with some clarity and, thankfully, less emotion. Not that I am not constantly fighting the battle with wistfulness. And I expect to do that for a while yet. But I’m much better. I’m healing. I think other members of my family are as well, even as we struggle some with the excising of a lifelong component of our identity.
A few weeks ago, my husband John and I traveled to Lancaster, Pa., and set up a booth at the annual Lancaster Printers’ Fair. According to Val Lucas, a professor of printmaking at Towson University (who has been an invaluable guide in all this), we should have been swarmed by printers for all we had to offer them. Well, the swarm was fairly small, really, and we didn’t sell a great deal. However, the entire experience rattled us farther along on the old roller-coaster of life for sure, with some fascinating discussions with random folks, and a surprising unity with people for whom printing is familiar and meaningful. For those interconnections made, I am grateful and edified.
For a while now I have been digging out long-forgotten sets of letters and numbers of varying fonts and point-sizes. Some of them have not been in the light of day for possibly 50 or even 75 years. Maybe longer. There is definitely something satisfying about dragging them out, wiping them off, and considering that perhaps the last hands to touch them were my dad’s or my grandfather’s or my great-grandfather’s, or perhaps my great-uncle George Hanst’s, who was the editor for nearly 40 years. Any of those guys. To them, these things were just tools of the job. They didn’t look at them and feel nostalgic, I don’t think. They rooted through them and picked out what they needed to spell out a sentence or design an ad. And then they carried on with it. Now I sit in that office entirely alone, looking at all that stuff. In my mind, reason battles with emotion until I want to send them both to their rooms without supper. I don’t like always feeling nostalgic or wistful. It’s time-consuming and can be depressing. I’ve had the fight going on in my brain for years now, launched when we first started talking about the possibility of selling the biz. The idea seemed surreal. How could we consider giving up the family business? The newspaper and print shop? The very sustaining entity of all our lives through five generations? But, at exactly the same time, we were stumped as to how we could continue to run it. The newspaper and print shop world is dying. Its time is passing. A family-owned newspaper, printed inhouse, is nearly extinct. As I have noted before in this blog, printers are going the way of the blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and milliners, among others. Technology charges along and takes no prisoners. What is left are the lovers of the past, the artisans, and the nostalgic. Of course there is merit in preserving history in some ways, and I am in great support of those who love to engage in the art and revel in the process. But to maintain such a workplace on a regular basis became defeating and illogical. Such is life.
At the printers’ fair, people would walk by our booth and catch a glimpse of our old fonts or line gauges or Linotype instruction books. They would stop then and linger over the stuff, saying things like “wow” or “I haven’t seen one of these since college” or “what the heck is this?” But then they would go on. John and I soon learned that if we started talking to them about our family history with the paper and print shop, their faces would change. They would light up, make eye contact, and really listen. It seems our family history is fairly interesting — to some, even fascinating. Having grown up in the family, I find it difficult to understand the fascination, honestly. It has always been part of my life, and my siblings can all say the same. But I was truly struck by the reactions and the engagement of these random people as we chatted about it. And it helped me to remove myself a little bit from what has always been, and to see it from a new place. The fact that a young man (Benjamin Hinkle Sincell/Ben/B.H.) bought a business in 1890 and his family kept it going through 2017 is pretty unique.
To make it more fascinating, we have a vast plethora of written words that record all of it. Ben wrote an editorial every week, and put the pages together completely on his own for years. So all those newspapers from 1890 on through the late 19th century are by his young hand alone. To augment this recorded history, we are also fortunate enough to have letters that he was writing at the time to his love, Lillian “Tay” Byrne Morris, who would later become his wife. But when he was a lowly newspaper editor and printer, she was of a more elite West Virginia family. She was trained in painting and enjoyed a rather comfortable existence. Her parents, especially her mother, were not keen on this inky fellow from across the tracks and state line. He was not up to their standards, and the marriage of the two would be put off for years. His letters are full of pleas and urging of Tay to marry him, along with proof that his printing business is gaining ground, professing at one point to be “in the office in my shirt sleeves, with more work than I know what to do with.” The letters provide a most beautiful setting for those early years, adding a deeply human component to the history being pressed out each week in Ben’s newspaper.
Tay and Ben Sincell
Removing myself from the lifelong experience of being a member of the family as well as a worker at the business, I do see that it is rich — this family business history that was born with these two young people, in love but being kept apart, at least for a while. At last she was free to marry him, by the way, and they did so in 1895. They went on to have five children. And that is when the first tendrils of family involvement uncurled and began to take root. I don’t know for sure if the five kids worked much at the office when they were young. I hope to somehow find out about that. But I imagine that there were days when B.H. might have needed his kids there. Sometimes work just piles up, and able hands are required. I grew up with that knowledge, spending many evenings at the shop stuffing papers (putting a section inside another section) or doing some repetitive task in what we called the “job shop,” which was where the commercial printing was processed. There we would collate booklets or run the stapler machine or help jog (shake together to straighten) piles of papers. Surely there were days when B.H. said, “I’ll need some help today at the shop.” And the kids would go. That’s how it was done, on through the years. My own sons grew up doing the same, in fact.
Ben and Tay’s children matured and went on their own ways. One daughter, Mary, died in her early 20s, of what ailment we are not certain, although she was apparently “sickly” most of her life. Of the remaining four, one did stay to work at the newspaper. That was my grandfather, Donald “Mose” Sincell. According to some family folks, Mose originally had designs on becoming a Lutheran pastor, and even enrolled at Gettsyburg College. But there was pressure to remain in Oakland, made more weighty when B.H. had some health issues. How would they get the paper out if B.H. could not? So Mose became a pressman. This is the point when I feel a pang of wistfulness. Did Mose sacrifice his calling to stay at the family business? Such a question crops up through the ages, for sure. My husband is always quick to note that in the early 20th century, people didn’t necessarily strive to work at a job that “fulfilled” them. People worked to survive. And if there was a job available, a person would step into it without considering whether or not it was the proper color of his soul’s parachute. And if the business owned by a father was in need of help, the offspring were the first to be called in. So Mose went, and he stayed for the rest of his life.
From left are Frances Richardson (niece to BH and Tay), Mary Sincell, Tay with baby Lillian Sincell, Mose Sincell seated, and Morris Sincell behind him. Photo taken in Mountain Lake Park, circa 1904.
I have quite vivid memories of seeking him out in the job shop, where inevitably he would be standing at the Heidelberg press running some print job. He would smile and greet me kindly every time. I knew if I stood there for just a little while, he would dig in his front pocket and jangle the change, and then produce a quarter for me. Understand that a quarter was a lot in the late ‘60s. I could go downstairs to Proudfoot’s Pharmacy and buy a whole little bag of candy and gum with that. Sometimes he would give me two quarters. I’m sure his donations went toward my first foray into buying Christmas gifts when I was about 5. I gave all my brothers and my dad new combs — each in its own little case — and to my mom and sister, I gave tiny bottles of perfume, everything purchased at the Ben Franklin 5 and 10. I felt very greathearted that year. I probably should’ve given something to my grandfather, yet I don’t think I did… but now I’ve digressed.
Mose and Bob running the press, circa 1950s.
Another sibling, my Aunt “Tink,” came to the newspaper, too. Her real name was Adeline. She was the baby, born in 1910. Mose was about 11 years her elder, so he had been at the office a long while when she came to proofread sometime in the early 1960s. And actually she was officially brought in to “hold copy” for yet another relative, my grandmother Elsie Hanst Sincell, Mose’s wife. My grandmother worked in the front office, accepting classified advertising, answering the phone, and proofreading. Her brother, George Hanst, came to the office as well, making the leadership of the newspaper shared among two families, yet the ownership remained purely Sincell. George served diligently as the associate editor until B.H’s death, and then was the editor in chief until 1977. So the family connections became rather complicated. B.H. was the founder, his son Mose was his successor. Mose’s wife Elsie’s brother was brought in as an editor. Elsie was always a bit adamant that all understood Tink was “just holding copy.” The tensions of an intertwined family business are hard to describe, but it suffices to note that competition is always there, lying in wait and coming out through some passivity as well as some overt aggression, depending on the moment. Working together with the same people with whom you gather for holidays, see at church, rely on in trouble, celebrate in joy, or grieve can make for some deep challenges and stress.
Tink’s husband, Bob Ruckert, worked there, too. He was a veteran of World War II and was working at the front desk of the Algonquin Hotel in Cumberland when he and Tink were first married. Tink asked her father to hire Bob, and soon he was on the staff. The family sent him off to learn how to run a Linotype. He then served as the company’s instructor of that complicated machine, eventually teaching my mom how to run it. (He told her that she learned it more quickly than he had ever seen, by the way. Mom is always so self-deprecating, claiming all the time that she’s not creative or smart, but her life accomplishments consistently say otherwise.)
George Hanst’s wife, Polly Johnson Hanst (married in 1931), contributed to the newspaper as well. She wrote a column titled “It Runs through My Mind.” It was about family, farming, 4-H, and life in general. Often she was clever and funny, as was George. I think sometimes how they must have had fun together. He was quiet and reserved, but witty. She was a huge personality in a tiny body, and she did love a good laugh. Together they influenced the direction of the newspaper quite a lot, especially in those earlier days. But there was always tension. B.H. maintained ownership of the company even as other family members joined in. The pay was adequate, just. I would never call the business “high-income.” I don’t think anyone in the family would. I believe there was a definite lack of frank discussion about pay and ownership and other touchy issues, which led to resentment, or at least some disappointment. The work was hard. Any dedicated staff member over the years would agree. It could be tedious and exacting, and it was definitely deadline-driven. Every single week. Every year. Every decade.
After World War II, my dad, Robert Sincell, took his place there, too. And another pang arises. Did Dad want to be there? In letters that he wrote to his parents during the war, his outlook changed over time. When he was first away, the world seemed thrilling and new and wide open. After three years of service, which was not in combat but on the outer edges of it, also tedious as well as lonely, he was ready to come back to the mountaintop. He missed the place that was in his dreams. Home. He missed his family, he missed the land, and the lure of the office was always there. He would go on to get his degree in journalism from West Virginia University, with an emphasis in advertising. And then he joined the family biz, bringing my mom along. B.H. died in 1947, so the business then fell mostly on the shoulders of George, Dad, and Mose, although Tay maintained some influence, as did Polly. The women of my clan were not submissive, for which I am ever grateful.
We in my family have often talked about Dad’s interest in medicine. He was fascinated with the human body and how it worked. Perhaps more importantly, he grew passionate about emergency medical care and went on to become a National Ski Patrol instructor, and later still co-founded the Garrett County rescue squads. He was the first emergency medical technician instructor in the county, training people for service in both the south and north. He was brilliant at it, frankly. So on the one hand, I have wondered if he might have led a different sort of life if the family business were not a component early on. On the other hand, perhaps he found sufficient joy in the emergency care while remaining loyal to his grandfather et al. The question is simply unanswerable, but one can certainly see the pull of a family organization for a young man willing to serve and wishing to be of aid. A well-trod path that lies smack dab in front of a young person’s feet is hard to resist when the world is pressuring him to choose. In the end, he was content with his career. Proud, even. As he should’ve been.
Dad (Bob Sincell) posing somewhat coyly next to a page form. I think this photo was used in a special 75th anniversary issue of the paper.
As time went on, our mother began her stint at the office, running the Linotype first and later the Compugraphic typsetters and the confounding “headliner” machine, which did not show you what you were typing but just spat out expensive film with your headlines on it, misspelled or not. My brother Ben learned how to operate the Linotype, as did Don. They all worked over summers or during busy times. Ben took on some of the paperwork of the business, too, helping out with that for years. Don worked as a photographer. Then in 1977, he stepped in to take over George’s position as editor. Don had earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology, though… And I earned mine in theatre arts, as did my husband, who also became a nearly 30-year staff member and officer of the company. I don’t think anyone would peg any of us for lifetime newspaper people. But that’s where we ended up. Did we pursue what we would’ve or should’ve? I can’t answer that. But I can attest to the fact that the pull of a family biz is firm.
As for me, I certainly did not predict my longevity at the paper. I joined in 1990, having moved back home after some years in North Carolina. John and I had married in 1989, and while he was content to stay in Chapel Hill, I was desperately homesick. I missed cool weather, I missed my parents, I missed living on top of mountains rather than down in the Piedmont. I wanted to have a baby, and the thought of doing that without my mother nearby was daunting. I wrenched us both out of N.C. and back to Maryland, where a writer in the newsroom had just quit. I decided to grab up that position “for the time being.” My plan was perhaps to go back to school and get a master’s degree so I could teach… And John came with me, of course, but without a job. However, the ad manager had also just given notice, so John went there. For a while. Then he took over my mom’s position as a typesetter and ad designer. When the photographer left, John moved into that role. I stayed in the newsroom throughout, writing thousands and thousands of articles and stories over the years. Ben’s wife Bev Sincell was a longtime staffer in the newsroom some 30 years ago. Our nieces Angie and Rachel both joined the company as well, and nephews Adam and Matthew worked stints, too, making it a truly five-generation biz. My boys put in many hours over the years. All of us, lifting that mantle.
What if there had been no family business? What paths would we have taken up in the end? There is little point to pondering such a question, especially since our work was not unimportant. We made differences in our community, and we worked hard to be of service. All of us. That was a key component of shouldering the mantle. But a family business does present a host of issues, some good and some bad. One can get swept into the current without planning to stay in the river, but getting back out can be a real challenge. John and I proceeded to have three sons in four years. We were therefore ensconced in our work, because the boys had to come first. We were tasked with providing for these kids we opted to have. The endeavor of finding other comparable work in this area was too much. Our lives were full and busy, with some lovely elbow room in our own company that allowed us to be with the boys more than we might have been in other work, but also with the ongoing responsibility of always being connected, 100% of the time, even on vacations or when sick. The task of producing a weekly newspaper is a compact, intense project, which we achieved every seven days. In the later years, the leadership of the newspaper was on Don, John, and me. All staff issues, health insurance challenges, equipment problems, building questions — all of it was our responsibility, combined with getting the paper out and keeping the job shop in business. Desktop publishing took a huge bite out of the commercial business, and printing our own paper with all our own equipment was growing more challenging by the day. The time came to sell. And we did it.
All those roots, grown deep and intertwined over more than 100 years, are now being pulled apart, gently but firmly. A family business has so many branches and tendrils, and the entire “plant” is symbiotic. The work provides some identity to those who do it, as well as those who are connected by family ties. I knew about “paper day” and the “office” and all of it from the very beginning of my life, as did my siblings, as did my cousins, as did my dad, as did my grandfather. In all those roots that grew and split off and twisted about, there were many that caused trouble. Tensions at work easily spilled over at home since everyone was connected. Family get-togethers could be tiresome after working all week with the same folks. Disagreements on how things should be run, who is in charge, who gets the credit, who should be hired and who should be let go, how company money should be spent — on and on — can all taint the family unit in ways that non-business folks often don’t realize. A tribe has to be sturdy to survive a company run by its members. We have certainly had our fallings-out over the years. And there are scars. But as we finally finish this chapter in the Sincell family history book, I think we can do it with confidence — confidence that the decision to move on is an acceptable one, and confidence that the entire journey represents, on the whole, work well done.
The loosing of the company tether has been a journey. For a long time, I felt like a balloon that had been let go, floating who knows where. My whole life, like my relatives, had in part been defined by the newspaper and the company. Now we are set free from it. We are set free from that exacting weekly deadline. We are free from having to pay attention and be alert to every county event or breaking news. We can slip in and out of a public meeting without saying anything, asking a single question, or writing even one word about it. We also have the new and welcome opportunity of looking forward to seeing one another. I miss my brother now. We worked next to each other through thick and thin, with dedication. We were together every day, often in tense circumstances. I never really had the occasion to miss him. But now we have moved on, and it is fun to see each other and catch up on things we used to talk about regularly. And my husband has a new job. In the mornings, he goes off to work, and I don’t go with him. I don’t know every nuance and event of his day since I am not there. He gets to tell me these things. What fun! We have worked together for almost our entire relationship, starting with Domino’s Pizza in North Carolina, then nearly 30 years at Sincell Publishing. The experience of having our own time and our own adventures is rejuvenating.
There are other families in Garrett County who have maintained businesses for a long time and then moved on. The Beachys and Fikes, the Shirers and Callises, the Brownings, the Stucks, and more. I’m sure all of us could have long talks about the unique odysseys of family-owned companies. I’m sure they, too, have had the occasional former customer ruefully complain, “Why did you give up the company? We miss it!” We get that sometimes, and I always feel a little wistful, and a little guilty. I know some people miss our brand of newspaper and the service it provided to our community, and I’m sorry about it. But to everything there is a season.
When I am sitting alone in the office, examining the tools and belongings bought at some point by someone in my family to help improve the business, I imagine the folks being there with me. I can feel the connection, and if we could speak, we would revel in our similar life stories, bound together so deeply by this endeavor, and by our strong family ties. We would agree that a business does not have to be the definition of a family, but we can be grateful that it lasted 130 years, employed hundreds of people, gained respect for its integrity and constancy, and operated full-steam ahead for such a long time. To those who work in a family business, I offer you my hand in solidarity and understanding. We should go get a beer and chat. We’d have a lot to talk about. And to my forebears, I offer my gratitude. Thank you for founding the business, for instilling in us the value of hard work, and for providing many of us with good, meaningful careers. It has been such an adventure.
A magical time has commenced for some of us, completely unknown to so many others. It’s a secret thing, quietly handled, fueled by the first wee glow of certain anticipation. What is this mystery of shadows and secrets, you ask? Why, it’s the return of rehearsals for the Garrett Choral Society, of course, launched Sunday afternoon. Lots of people arrived in their shorts and tennies, reuniting with others of like minds, ready to jump into another season of song. One of life’s most satisfying journeys has to be making music with other people. I feel so fortunate to be a member of that crowd, because there is hardly anything like it. And the combination of summer’s end with the first read-through of Christmas music has its very own appeal.
I know, I know — Christmas already? No way! I am of that mind, too, about everything else. I hate the arrival of Christmas displays in October, or when stores start playing holiday music the day after Halloween. I loathe that the Christmas rev-up is so long, making people so sick of it all that they pitch out their Christmas trees on Dec. 26. Ugh. The commercialization of the season has been vile for decades — just ask Charlie Brown — in 1964. The rotten love of money has created so many monsters, and the hard-core cheapening of Christmas is certainly one of them. But. The music is different. It’s especially different when it is made early by musicians who are in earnest to learn it well. The non-music folks don’t know what it takes. They might know that we rehearse for a long time, but mostly they know they can go to a December concert and hear pleasing sounds that help fuel their own Christmas spirit. They aren’t thinking of that right now. But those of us who are preparing to present that music must think of it now. We must begin now if we want to learn the notes, the words, the dynamics, the timing, the tempo, and more. The learning process of choral singing can be arduous. And I adore it.
The first rehearsal is always fun. We get to see each other, for one thing. We are singing friends, but may not mingle with one another in other circles. So we are happy to meet again. We are music savvy, so we grab up our packet of songs for the season and look through them. We say “oooh” and “ahhh.” (Sometimes we say “gross,” but we try to keep those comments to a minimum.) There is loud chatter as we all meander toward our seats. We are all there to dive in, to learn, and to combine our voices to make a layered and interesting sound. After a flurry of welcome-backs and rapid-fire announcements about this newest season, we finally get to crack open that first piece and give it a go. At long last.
The first run of a piece is a brain exercise. The singer must read both the words and the notes, stay in time, keep an eye on the director, but not so much that she gets lost on the page. I am always just glued to the alto line, trying to hang on like I’m gripping the sides of a roller coaster. Finding the notes can be tricky, especially right at first. I have sight-read music for much of my life, and enjoy the challenge most of the time. There are people who have what is called “perfect pitch,” which is an innate ability to know how a specific note sounds, or to know what sound is what specific note. I do not have that trait. My friends and co-singers Trevor and Evan do, but it is pretty rare. Over the years, though, I have learned where certain notes fall in my throat. Given a little time, I can probably accurately sing F or G above middle C. I know how to sing intervals most of the time, although fourths give me trouble. When I am looking at the measure, I see where the notes are going, and I stay a little ahead in my brain while my vocal chords follow up just behind, singing that note I just read. It’s a roller coaster, I tell ya.
While I’m doing all that figuring, everyone else is doing it, too, and the blend is sometimes so satisfying, even that first time through. I have often likened it to working out a crossword puzzle. The notes are the clues, and the void ahead of us is that blank puzzle. We all have our clues — all those little black notes — and as we altos make our voices sound those clues, the tenors and basses and sopranos sing out their clues, too. And just like filling in the blank squares in a crossword, we see how the whole thing comes together, all four parts, plus the piano. And it is fun. Sometimes the wheels fly off, though. We lose the thread and fall away. Some singers keep pushing on, able to cling to the coaster for a little longer. Then we just dissolve in groans and usually laughter. Our directors, Sean and Debi Beachy, are easy-going and fun. Debi is the vocal expert, and Sean is an amazing pianist. But both are quite capable in each other’s spot, too, with Sean sometimes directing while Debi accompanies quite capably on piano. They are a talented pair, and rehearsals are more fun because they seem to enjoy the whole experience. They tease each other and exchange quips. But they also both know so much music theory, structure, and terminology, which makes it easy for them to communicate with one another about what is needed musically. And then they are able to relay the information to all of us singers.
Most of those folks who come listen to the concert in December don’t know that we start working in September. They don’t know that the Beachys take us through the pieces, marking where they want us to take breaths and where they don’t. Breathing in music is a big deal. People who don’t sing may never really consider that, except for maybe the rare and awkward moment of hearing a soloist run out of air. We must always come to rehearsal with a pencil to make breath marks exactly where we are to breathe, and to make other notes in our music. We study where to put a final S on a word so that there is no hissing sound made by people adding the S whenever they choose. We study how to enunciate words like “Bethlehem” and “Hosannah,” and we learn how to pronounce Latin words properly and uniformly. This is why we start in September. It’s a process, and it can’t be rushed if the final product is to be presented with confidence and precision.
The final product — the concerts — are honestly never quite as fun to me as the rehearsals. I love the process of learning and creating. I love perfecting the sound and remembering what chords are correct. I cherish the time with my friends, and with people who share the same affinity for making music together. We ponder difficult passages and come up with solutions in timing to help us get it right. The honing process is satisfying. We make progress every week, quietly working away on music that seems out of time with the just-changing leaves and the singers still wearing flipflops and shorts. The world is not Christmasy yet, thank heavens, but there is some comfort in already conjuring up the images. The snow, the Madonna, the baby…the pine and holly… all the tradition and trimmings. We sing sacred songs of the Christmas story and secular songs of winter’s return.
The singers in this group are of all walks of religion, from the very devout to the not so much. But we all cherish the power of music, and the sensations it can stir in those who listen. For some, and I put myself more in this category, the music itself is nearly a religion. It’s a practice, a comfort, a ritual, a devotion. I have been inspired to make music all my life, and it never fails to soothe my pain and bring me peace. As I sit there in the row of altos, I can hear the bass singers just behind me, singing the lowest notes of the staff. I love sitting in front of them because their sound is so rich, and, more importantly, reminiscent of my dad’s voice. Dad was a wonderful bass singer. He didn’t really read bass clef music expertly, but he learned the notes quickly anyway — somehow — and his throaty, deep voice added so much. I remember when he died that what I longed for the most was just to hear his voice again. I still wish I could. But singing just in front of those guys and hearing those resonating, lowest notes makes me think of him, and it’s a comfort.
My mom sang, too, and still does when her 90-year-old voice doesn’t cheat her out of it. In fact, Mom and Dad met one another for the first time as members of the Potomac State Singers. Dad was just out of the Navy, having served in WWII, and Mom was seeking her associate degree in what I think today would be as a medical transcriptionist. Mom was an alto then, and her alto friend (who can be such fun, by the way) made a remark one day about a certain bass. “That Bob Sincell has the nicest brown eyes I’ve ever seen.” So Mom took a look, and had to agree. Some time later, she was walking to her Aunt Sallie’s house, where she stayed during school, and Dad drove up next to her in the family newspaper’s station wagon. He asked if she needed a ride. She declined, politely. He tried again a little later, asking her out to dinner and dancing. She accepted. And that was the start. It all began in a choir rehearsal. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
So to all those who now have Christmas music in their folders long before the world is thinking much of it, I say happy new season. We will continue on with our secret and quiet practice, with dedicated lovers of music exploring the new notescapes and working hard to interpret them as the composers intended, and as our audiences will appreciate. As the leaves turn orange and pumpkin spice takes over, we will sing of falling snow and jingling bells, of decking halls and merry gentlemen. We will conjure images of kings and shepherds, and, most poignantly, of mother and son, which always resonates with me so keenly. Often the words convey the joy of a mother as she beholds her infant boy, and I think of my own sons, my joy, my heart. I do admit, too, that I sometimes love that her name was Mary.
Hats off to all those musicians already dashing through the snow, crammed in one-horse open sleighs. Thank you for your dedication and willingness to dive into the drifts before the leaves even fall. I’m with you! Let’s dash!
My petunias are leggy and I can’t keep up with the tomatoes piling up on my counter top — both sure signs that August has reached its twilight. We have a plethora of delicious green beans right now, delivered regularly by my brother Ben, who raps on our screen door and says, “Your friendly green grocer is here.” He and his wife Bev have a huge garden, the produce of which they share with all of us without hesitation. Family comforts. This is the age of perfect tomatoes, too — the only time of year that they taste so good and full of flavor. Everything is full of flavor, in fact. The apples are fat and juicy, as are the peaches. There are beets and carrots, melons and corn. The farmers’ market is positively flush with produce. Everywhere you look there are shiny onions and such green bell peppers, cherry tomatoes and beefy honeydews. This summer is dwindling, and it is the time of harvest — the best time for food of the whole year.
The skies of late summer are nearly too striking to be believed, blue and deep. The serenade of crickets’ scraping legs is constant now, morning to night, joined at dusk by the ratchet grind of the katydids. The cicadas’ buzz has lessened in recent days, going the way of August heat… dying away for another year. The ground has suffered some from that heat and the lack of a good soaking rain. Grass is wiry and brown in places, thirsty and spent. Looking up, one can see that leaves are growing tired of grasping their branches. They are beginning to curl with age, and some are even starting to lose their green. I am always dismayed to see those first leaves of color. The rapidity of that onset is jarring. Surely it’s not time for that! Ah, but it is. The planet keeps whirling even if we wish it would not go so fast.
Thus comes the melancholy of late summer. I wish I didn’t feel it, but I do. Summer is so brief here on the mountaintop. Brief and brilliant. I find myself silently pleading with these August days of warmth to please linger. I want to reject the idea that soon the whole ground will be littered with leaves spiked with yellow and gold. I don’t want the cicadas to stop buzzing. I don’t want the rain to turn cold or the perennials to die away just yet. Not yet.
My brain simply can’t let it go — I always end up equating the end of summer with the end of life. The parallels are elementary. Life coming to literal fruition, all things having pointed to that culmination of birth, growth, success…. and then the end. All to go to sleep and die off, silenced under a quilt of snow and ice, not to rise again for many months. And never to be the same. I hate saying goodbye. I dread those moments in life when we have to separate from that which we love. And it’s just inevitable, in all things. Sending our children off into the world. Saying goodbye to our cherished but short-lived pets. Reaching the end of a relationship. Keeping vigil at the side of a dying friend. If we risk anything at all, we always have to say goodbye. And sometimes I just don’t feel like it. Late August is one of those times.
But what if I didn’t have to say goodbye? What if the lazy days of August did stay? What if each day were brilliant with sunshine and that azure sky, what if the tomatoes just kept tomatoing, the beans just kept beaning? What if I could keep swimming in that soft 82-degree water of my mom’s pool every day, on and on? Never ending, always August. Yeah, that wouldn’t be great. My fickle heart would soon long for a change. I would grow wistful for autumn and all that beautiful death. Bright leaves, the blooms of September weed, the mums opening their spiky heads to say “happy fall, everyone.” I would yearn for the prospect of my three sons making the trek back home for the Autumn Glory Festival so that they, too, can see the brilliance, play some games, borrow a sweatshirt, light a fire on mom’s porch for a chilly evening of being together, and then say goodbye again.
If August were immortal, my soul would soon ache for those first few snowflakes, I know it. I would dream of that first sighting, that first squeal of “Hey, it’s snowing!” I would miss the evenings of companionship with John, together in our quiet living room, a fire crackling away and some familiar TV show playing as the wind whips around our house, sculpting drifts and forcing the mercury to lie low. I would miss it. I would miss that poignant silence of a deep snow, when all is still. And soon I would obsess about spring. I would crave that time of melting, when rivulets fly down the hillsides, crafting pathways in the dying snow. I would so want to detect the scent of dirt under the ice, ever emerging despite any late, wet snowfall — a swan song of winter as it, too, gives way and says goodbye. If August stayed, how would I celebrate the pointy heads of my Ice Follies daffodils that strive toward the sunshine so early in the spring? How would I experience that promise of blooms to come, flowers to burst open, and the full yellow sunshine to warm my whole skin? It would already be there, and I would have grown to loathe it.
So I suppose I will have to say goodbye, as much as I don’t want to. We always have to, and the moment of separation is bitter. There’s no getting around it. We must pay for our joy, our love, and our comfort. We pay with grief. It is often a steep price, keenly felt at the time of payment. I have not been battered so much in life that I don’t feel the investment is worth it, thankfully. So far I think it is usually a fair trade, difficult as it may be.
For now, though, I will savor these senior summer days. They are still here, after all. The calendar says fall doesn’t commence until Sept. 22, so that gives me nearly four good weeks of sun and swimming, tomatoes tasty and fat, and those last brilliant blooms. I will take it all, saving my goodbye for the last possible moment.
